Affiliation:
1. Experimental Psychology, Giessen University
2. Center for Vision Research, Department of Psychology, York University
Abstract
Color is a prime example of categorical perception, yet it is unclear why and how color categories emerge. On the one hand, prelinguistic infants and several animals treat color categorically. On the other hand, recent modeling endeavors have successfully utilized communicative concepts as the driving force for color categories. Rather than modeling categories directly, we investigate the potential emergence of color categories as a result of acquiring visual skills. Specifically, we asked whether color is represented categorically in a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained to recognize objects in natural images. We systematically trained new output layers to the CNN for a color classification task and, probing novel colors, found borders that are largely invariant to the training colors. The border locations were confirmed using an evolutionary algorithm that relies on the principle of categorical perception. A psychophysical experiment on human observers, analogous to our primary CNN experiment, shows that the borders agree to a large degree with human category boundaries. These results provide evidence that the development of basic visual skills can contribute to the emergence of a categorical representation of color.
Funder
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
York University
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Subject
General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine,General Neuroscience
Cited by
11 articles.
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